Hamed Hanafi is a busy researcher these days. During the week, the Dalhousie University postdoc is interning with a Halifax-based medical company through a Mitacs Accelerate research project. During the evenings and weekends, he’s pursuing a personal goal of becoming an entrepreneur and getting a passion project off the ground.

“I don’t think I realized I was an entrepreneur at first,” says Jeremy Koenig, founder of Halifax-based genomics start-up, Athletigen. “But then as I got more experience, I started to realize how my background in research could be an asset to me in founding a company — so I did just that.”

But while the Halifax-based startup had worked-out the mechanical design of its brace, its team knew they needed people with expertise in body movement and rehabilitation to test it. That’s where Mitacs Accelerate came in.

It has been really good to see the strong relationship between researchers and companies in Nova Scotia. I am really happy that Mitacs has given us good connections to industry in Canada so we can see how our research would work in real life.

The Mitacs Accelerate internship provided a fantastic opportunity to grow as an engineer in training and to become familiar with the challenges faced in realizing the commercial potential of my research.